20 May 2018 1:13 AM

The mere sight of an armed police officer in this country makes me instantly furious and miserable. Sometimes I just have to look away, while I collect myself. Then I hurry off, as fast as I can.

This is instinctive and emotional. But it is not irrational. The reasons for it run deep. I was brought up in a country which was actively proud that its police were not armed.

Now I am told that rural police are to be armed on the excuse that this will guard our shires against terrorism. It is a pretext. It just means that, like everywhere else, our police will routinely have firearms. This will be the end of Britain as it was.

We used to think that other, less happy nations might need to use guns to keep order. We did not. And for many years I returned from travels abroad and rejoiced at this difference between my home and foreign lands.

As George Orwell said, the beer was bitterer and the coins were heavier. And the police were different. They weren't the unapproachable scowling army of the state, they were the police of a free, peaceful population, our allies against crime and disorder.

Then, after an especially long stint overseas, I came back, looked for the familiar constables I was used to, and I found that we now had cops instead. It was the beginning of one of the most profound changes in our society that has ever taken place, one about which we were not consulted, and which was never openly discussed.

They stopped walking, except occasionally in pairs. They zoomed about in cars, they wore flat caps and big boots, handcuffs, clubs and a mass of ironmongery hung from their big belts. And, affected by this transformation, they had begun to swagger and scowl as well. No wonder. All this clattering stuff said clearly that they did not like or trust the public any more.

Bit by bit it grew worse. Even in my peaceful home town I began to see cops with sub-machine guns standing grimly outside court buildings. The flat caps gave way to baseball caps.

And in the capital I learned to expect to see armed officers, on the excuse (which I think is thin) that they are guarding embassies and other sensitive buildings. If the threat is really that great, then the Army should guard them. If not, then taking police constables away from their real jobs, and employing them as sentries, should end.

People will tell me that 'lives would have been saved' if armed police officers had been present at some recent supposed terrorist incidents. But my researches show that almost all these events were the work of deranged individuals out of their minds on drugs. The fast-spreading abuse of drugs is, pretty certainly, the main single reason for the much higher levels of violence we now have.

It is so obvious. People in their right minds recoil from serious violence. But mind-altering drugs make them capable of terrible actions. If every violent criminal (and suicide) was checked for his use of marijuana, steroids or antidepressants, I think the connection would rapidly become undeniable. But powerful, rich lobbies fear such checks.

If we had a proper patrolling police force of the old kind, many of these incidents would never happen. Such a force would apply the boring laws on drug possession which our armed and scowling gendarmes, and their soppy, pseudo-intellectual chief officers, think are beneath them. Through their intimate knowledge of their beats and their frequent contact with the law-abiding, they would be aware of the strange behaviour of such people long before it became a danger.

For an unarmed, modest, old-fashioned police force, which walks quietly among us, has millions of willing eyes and ears, in the shape of a friendly and supportive public.

But an armed state militia, dressed for combat with its face set in a rigid frown and its hands ever reaching for gun, club or handcuffs, such as we now have, is a stranger to the people. And as well as making us look like a foreign despotism, it will fail in its task.

***

Finally! A detective driven by real justice

At last a TV crime drama which challenges the police’s growing tendency to believe the accused is guilty until proven innocent.

In ITV's Innocent, Angel Coulby plays a highly intelligent and thoughtful police officer, contrasted with a dim-witted and dishonest colleague who bends the evidence to fit his prejudices.

And, as a result, someone who looks wholly guilty is exonerated, in the face of public prejudice.

I do wish TV drama chiefs would now discover the works of the detective story writer Josephine Tey, a million times cleverer than Agatha Christie. Her brilliant books specialise in overturning prejudice and defying the obvious.

***

The ONLY way to rescue our railways

Nationalisation is the natural state of modern railways. Dress it up any way you like, they are never going to make a real profit. The benefit they give to our civilisation cannot be measured in money alone, but in speed, safety, energy efficiency, clean air and reduced noise pollution.

The absurd 'privatisation' imposed on them by silly John Major in the 1990s has never worked, and will never work. The increase in passenger numbers which came soon afterwards wasn't because of privatisation. It resulted from an explosion in long-distance commuting, caused by high house prices. Had it been given the enormous subsidies handed to the privatised train companies, efficient old British Rail could have given us a network to be proud of.

Time and again privatisation has failed, even on its own terms. Last week, yet again, the majestic East Coast route had to be taken back into public ownership because private contractors have made a mess of it.

They did so in spite of the fact that BR had handed them an electrified and highly modern line.

People who think private operators have made this service better don't know what they're talking about. I look at the ghastly Virgin services of the past few years, with their horrible matey publicity, stupid notices in the lavatories, flashy livery and incomprehensible fares.

And then I think of the sight of the old Tyne-Tees Pullman coming into the great curve of York station in the 1970s, with a uniformed attendant at every door, smack on time; or of the beautiful, steam-hauled Elizabethan in the 1950s carrying me south across the Forth Bridge. If Richard Branson's tawdry trains are an improvement on them, then the world's been turned upside down.

***

I'm rather impressed with Lord Attlee, the Tory peer who's the grandson of our greatest Labour premier (and looks amazingly like his grandfather). Not only does he chivalrously admit defeat when beaten in a fair fight, as he was over press controls, but he also has a sense of humour. Asked on Sunday if he had anything against the press, he replied: 'My only complaint is that hardly anyone has ever heard of me.'

***

I've often assumed that a lot of rock songs are about drugs. In fact, I regard the rock industry as advertising for the drug culture. But the stars themselves often deny it. So I nearly spilt my tea last Tuesday morning when Mick Jagger, interviewed on Radio 4, casually remarked that his song You Can't Always Get What You Want (much liked by Donald Trump) is 'about drugs in Chelsea'.

***

So off we go once more to the futile battlegrounds of Afghanistan, where no foreign army has succeeded, ever. This time we're being assured that British troops will be there only to train the Afghans. Last time we were told that their mission would be accomplished without a shot being fired. Yet within months the flag-wrapped coffins were being flown home. 'When will they ever learn?' as Marlene Dietrich used to sing.

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06 May 2018 1:59 AM

Here they come again, waving identity cards. The people who wrecked Britain in the first place now want to make it even worse.

Having flung our borders wide to anyone who cared to wander in, they want to use this as an excuse to introduce identity cards.

Former Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson, and the incessant Blairite cheerleader and Times columnist David Aaronovitch, are noisily trying to dig up this grisly political corpse.

But Mr Aaronovitch spoiled things a bit by admitting that such a move would have to come ‘in tandem with an amnesty’.

He is right. Even on its own terms, the scheme is far too late to solve the migration crisis.

Millions of new people are already here, many hundreds of thousands quite illegally, and no conceivable British government would ever try to remove them all.

It can cope with a few symbolic expulsions, to make itself look tough. But can you imagine what would happen if it attempted a mass round-up of everyone who has ever climbed out of the back of a lorry and vanished into the dusk?

I can. It would explode in their faces.

The unintended consequence of mass registration will, in reality, be – as Mr Aaronovitch rightly says – an official amnesty for illegal migrants.

In which case it will be difficult to object to a future amnesty for the next lot of illegals who arrive, once there are so many of them here that it becomes an issue.

So, if identity cards don’t actually solve that problem, what do we have left? A threat to your liberty and mine.

These Blairites come from a broadly Marxist tradition (which I suspect Mr Aaronovitch understands better than Mr Johnson), so they have nothing much against centralised state power over the individual.

Mr Johnson is a nicer man who can be forgiven much because of his beautiful and moving memoir of his childhood, This Boy. But he shouldn’t be let off when he gets things wrong.

The other evening, at a celebration of the genius of the great writer and Englishman George Orwell, Mr Johnson told me (in his usual charming way) that he thought he might have persuaded Orwell to endorse our regime of CCTV cameras, surveillance of emails and increased police powers.

I do not think so. In his greatest work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell warned quite specifically against a nightmare world of hidden cameras and microphones, and arbitrary rule, much of it excused by a supposed external threat from an ever-changing enemy. I reread it often in case I forget this warning.

I am confident he would have recognised in present-day Britain the hardening outlines of an oppressive surveillance state in which the individual is powerless.

One of the keys to its operation will be identity cards.

That is their real point. They were quite useless for any of their claimed purposes when we last had them between 1939 and 1952.

I can find no instance of any spy or fifth-columnist having been caught through their use in that period.

But hundreds of busybodies and petty tyrants used them to make life difficult for innocent individuals going about their lawful business.

One of my favourite stories about this era concerns one British Jew, Myer Rubinstein, who decided not to register.

I assume he did so because he very wisely thought that, if a Nazi invasion ever came, registration would mean certain death for him, as the identity registers of so many other European countries had meant death for so many other Jews.

He went undetected without such a card, throughout the Second World War and for many years afterwards.

As for the supposed use of such cards in ‘establishing your identity’, this spectacularly did not prove to be the case for Charles Jarman, leader of the Seamen’s Union who, in 1945, was ludicrously arrested on suspicion of having led a smash-and-grab raid.

Police held him for hours despite his identity card showing ‘who he was’.

This sort of thing led, thanks to the fury and persistence of a single High Court judge, to the abolition of these useless, oppressive, breathing licences.

Actually, such cards prove nothing, except that the State has issued them. Very few criminal cases or frauds are about the identity of the culprit.

Terrorists, we may be sure, will have the very best and most convincing identity cards of all.

But if we submit to them, we will all have lost something vital. For centuries, in the English-speaking countries, the State and its officers have had to identify themselves to us, rather than the other way round.

This is the right relationship between citizen and government. It is like the presumption of innocence and jury trial, a practical and vital proof that we are free men and women.

To accept identity cards would be to turn our whole free constitution upside down, and place the State above our heads rather than under our feet, where it belongs.

If we do this, we will take a huge step back towards being serfs.

And we will be spitting on the inheritance of liberty our parents handed on to us, and betraying our children and grandchildren.

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08 April 2018 1:22 AM

Actually, I wish the police would arrest people for defending their homes more often than they already do. It might finally alert the great complacent middle of British politics and opinion to what has happened in this country, so that they eject the people who are responsible, and achieve real change.

It might introduce more law-abiding people to the truth, that our country has been hijacked by elitist dolts, that one key result of this is that the police are not our friends any more, and that they do not serve justice in any way that we understand it.

The most contemptible voice in the midst of these events is that of David Gauke, the ridiculously entitled ‘Justice Secretary’, who claims to be on the side of homeowners against burglars. Oh really, Mr Gauke? Not unless you resign from your politically correct Ministry and your soppy party, you aren’t. Is it possible that you can be so ignorant about the workings of the state you claim to run?

The arrest of Richard Osborn-Brooks after the death of a burglar in his house is in fact a completely typical example of our Left-infiltrated police in operation. There is no point getting cross about it if you do not then demand a total reform of the police and the courts.

No doubt most police officers are perfectly nice men and women, who love animals and are kind to their mothers. But they do not work for us. They work for a state that has been taken over by 1960s radicals.

Have you ever asked why the police are so keen to arrest respectable people who defend their own houses? In general, they do not much want to meet the respectable classes. They have closed hundreds of police stations, and ceased regular foot patrols.

They have great trouble answering the telephone. If they appear in public at all, they do so in pairs, deep in conversations about overtime and clearly not wanting to be interrupted or distracted. They can’t conceal how bored they are by burglary and car theft.

They are unwilling to do anything serious about anti-social behaviour and defeatist on drugs. But defend yourself or your home with any vigour, and they are there in large numbers waving handcuffs and DNA swabs.

Meanwhile, in our capital city homicides rise, seemingly uncontrollably, to levels (so far this year) rivalling those in New York. These figures, unlike those for other crimes, cannot be concealed or massaged out of existence.

They tell a rotten truth about our whole country, that bad people daily grow more confident, and good people daily grow more scared. The answer to this puzzle is simple.

The police of this country are at their most enthusiastic when they are defending their monopoly against the danger of competition. It would be disastrous for them if anyone else started enforcing laws in the way most people want them enforced.

Any sign of old-fashioned law and order, and it must be stamped out swiftly, in case it catches on and puts their failed nationalised industry out of business.

For 50 years now, they have been pursuing fashionable, mad theories about crime, which were stupid when they were first suggested, and are stupider still now that they have been shown, in grim detail, to have utterly failed.

These theories are all based on the batty idea that criminals are not responsible for their own actions, and crime is not caused by human wickedness and greed, nor by lack of fear of being caught and punished.

Government and police alike think that crime is the result of bad social conditions, child abuse or one of the many forms of ‘discrimination’ of which we are all guilty.This is why people who do bad things are seldom punished.

With a very few exceptions, they are repeatedly let off, cautioned, cautioned again, given social workers to make excuses for them, fined, allowed not to pay those fines, fined again, let off again, given community service which they do not do, let off, given bail, not locked up when they commit new offences on bail, given bail again. They become the terror of their neighbours.

Then they are given suspended prison sentences which are not activated when they reoffend.

Eventually, after many years of this, when they have become career criminals and are beyond all hope of redemption, they may be sent to prisons which are run by the inmates, and almost immediately released again with tags round their ankles, which are not monitored.

Equally stupid commercial products and fashions from this era – such as flared trousers for men and Watneys Red Barrel – have long ago vanished from general sale and would be greeted with mockery and astonishment if anyone tried to reintroduce them.

But the liberal reforms of the 1960s – which, unlike flared trousers and keg beer, have done actual, real damage to society – live on unchanged.

The remedies are all simple: for example, the restoration of preventive regular police foot patrols, the repeal of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and its pro-criminal codes of practice, the enforcement of the laws against drug possession, the return of the policy of ‘due punishment of responsible persons’ to the prisons.

The Left-wing purges of judges and magistrates, pursued furiously during the Blair years, also need to be reversed.

But who will do these things? Nobody, as long as the British law-abiding classes continue to rely on the political leadership which has made such a mess of this country for the past half century.

In which case it is a matter of time until somebody else – perhaps it will be you – is arrested by some wooden-faced plod for daring to defend his home against savage thieves.

*****

Theresa May has once again demonstrated that she is the new Harriet Harman, not the new Margaret Thatcher. Her ridiculous enthusiasm for last week’s frenzy about a ‘gender pay gap’, and her claim of a ‘stark division’ between the pay of men and women, are embarrassing.

The measure used, a crude average, told us nothing about the truth, which is that most employers obey the law enforcing equal pay for equal work, and try as hard as they possibly can to employ and promote women. Clumsy quotas may actually hurt women, as employers try to game the figures by giving low-paid, entry-level jobs to men, while appointing women to senior well-paid posts.

State nagging will not make things better. A serious conservative Premier would listen to the most thoughtful voice on the subject, Kate Andrews of the Institute of Economic Affairs. She has shown that the statistics demanded by Mrs May’s Government conceal far more than they reveal.

They mainly show that, for whatever reason, women have different career patterns from men. In many cases, this is because women choose to do so. As Ms Andrews points out, this could be because women have more sensible ideas than men on the right balance between life and work.

When she explained this on the BBC, her ‘impartial’ interviewer finished the exchange by contradicting her. How can we have a proper debate on anything in this country when everyone has been taught what to think, but almost nobody knows how to think?

*******

Surely Winnie Mandela lost any respect she might have commanded (such as it was) after her endorsement of the practice of ‘necklacing’ those accused of informing by the African National Congress.

This was a mixture of torture and murder, whose victims took 20 unimaginable minutes to die after petrol-soaked tyres were placed over their heads and ignited.

24 December 2017 1:47 AM

How can the police be too powerful and too feeble at the same time? This is perhaps the greatest avoidable scandal of our age, and yet nobody ever does anything about it.The decisions which led to this mess can easily be tracked down. I did it years ago, and have supplied the details to politicians (including Theresa May) and senior police officers.It benefits nobody, least of all the police themselves. So why is it never put right? The amazing fall of Damian Green might serve some purpose if it led to action. But will it? I couldn’t care less about Mr Green. I may have met him once, but am not sure. I despise his party and the Government of which he was a member. But the behaviour of some of the police officers who searched his parliamentary offices, and have since gone public with pornography claims, seems to me to be disgraceful and wrong. It is an improper use of powers given to them for other purposes.I shuddered when I first heard of the case, sensing in it a threat to freedom in general, as I often do these days. The initial arrest was dubious and looked political. This doesn’t just affect politicians. Thanks to powers very foolishly given to them, the police now act as judge and jury in thousands of cases. They can publicly ruin a person by noisily arresting him in a well-publicised dawn raid, even though they have no real case against him.They can make him unemployed by keeping him on endless so-called ‘police bail’. This is a sinister and lawless procedure, allowing police to punish individuals against whom nothing has ever been proved. And many of these decisions are taken by highly political people, trained and indoctrinated in the new dogmas of political correctness, quite distinct from the old-fashioned coppers who came from the normal world and shared the general view of right and wrong.At the beginning of the 19th Century, Parliament feared that the police would turn into just such an engine of oppression and secret power. Only when Robert Peel came up with his brilliant idea of citizens in non-military, modest uniform, unarmed and with tightly limited powers, patrolling the streets on foot, did MPs at last agree to allow an experiment.And it worked. It worked brilliantly. It never got too powerful. Its constables were the servants of the public, and knew it. Their presence on the streets prevented thousands of the sorts of crimes that now go undeterred and unpunished. They were a rallying point for the good and a warning to the bad. They never got above themselves, wore baseball caps or disappeared to go on sociology courses. The net of local police stations, open all hours and close to where we lived and worked, made it easily accessible. It never stopped working. Right into the 1960s, official inquiries confirmed that it was still highly effective. The most advanced academic research, by James Q. Wilson, has since endorsed it as the best type of policing known to man. By discouraging small offences, it discouraged large-scale crime too. It wasn’t perfect. There was some corruption, and some brutality. But these resulted from the failings of human individuals, not the system itself.Alas, a combination of liberal political reform and vain, fashionable innovation, backed by a few prominent journalists, ended it in a few short years. The police disappeared into cars and back offices, specialist squads and political correctness lectures. Wherever they were, they weren’t on the streets. Besieged by louts? Call back next week, we’re busy. Burgled? Fill in this form, we’re busy. People openly using drugs on the street? Not interested. But ask them to join in a Gay Pride march and they’ll be along, high heels and nail varnish at the ready. Police stations were closed by the hundred (it is still happening). Those that were not sold off were closed for most of the time, and in many cases have come to resemble Soviet border control posts, with those inside them cut off from the public by thick glass and long waits. New stations were sited far from town centres, to emphasise that the police don’t need us and expect the same in return.It is obligatory at this point to say that there are still decent police officers, and so there are. But St Francis of Assisi, or Superman, would struggle to do a good job under these conditions.It has all been a terrible, unnecessary mistake. It would be easy, cheap and popular to put it right. Mrs May would become a national heroine and be remembered as long as Robert Peel if she would only do it. Well, why doesn’t she?

Finally, the truth about our pointless nukes, from a man who REALLY knows

The unforgivable false allegations against Field Marshal Lord Bramall did achieve one good thing.

They reminded us that, still living in our midst, we have a great and distinguished soldier with real experience of war and battle, and an unrivalled store of firsthand knowledge and common sense.

So why wasn’t more attention paid to his trenchant statement a few days ago that the planned replacement of Britain’s Trident submarine fleet is a futile waste of money?

In his view, we should keep one boat and a few rockets and warheads for emergencies. It is as if Father Christmas had announced that reindeer were obsolete. You have to listen when someone so expert speaks.

He says: ‘Now the credibility has gone completely and it no longer deters. We would set a great example to the rest of the world by getting rid of them. The money could be better spent elsewhere.’

He adds what everyone in Whitehall knows in their hearts: ‘I can think of no circumstance whatever in which a British Prime Minister would authorise the use of nuclear weapons.’ Lord Bramall is no peacenik.

Nobody can claim he is a Russian or North Korean agent. He has faced real bullets, fighting for his country. His trained mind still blazes with fierce intelligence, and he has the courage to say what he really thinks.

So next time some noisy pseudo-patriot parades the worn-out and untrue arguments for this gigantic waste of national resources, remember what our most distinguished military mind thinks. The truth is, he has dozens of allies among today’s senior officers of all services, but they are scared of stupid politicians.

Happy Christmas

And so we come to that brief truce called Christmas. I still love it, despite everything.

I would cheerfully reintroduce transportation for life for the Albanians and their beat-box on the high street, on their 43rd rendition of Jingle Bells so far today.

The Queen’s Christmas broadcast sometimes comes close to converting me to republicanism. I am stonily unmoved by John Lewis Yuletide filmlets. But each year I live, the idea that the creator of the universe appeared among us as a defenceless newborn baby demanding nothing from us but love grows more and more true and persuasive.

Isn’t this, in fact, exactly how our lives are changed, over and over and over again?

Happy Christmas, and many thanks to all those who have sent me kind Christmas wishes.

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26 October 2017 2:23 PM

I spent an enjoyable Tuesday evening in Liverpool haranguing a modest crowd in the open air, something I don’t think I have done since about 1972, when I used occasionally to plead the Trotskyist case to indifferent passers-by on Saturday afternoons, near one of the city’s best fish-and-chip shops, in King’s Square, in York. Some pictures used to exist of these events (taken without my knowledge) but the prints I was kindly but anonymously sent a few years ago have gone missing in one of my many moves. I wonder if the negatives still exist. They emerged because Matthew Norman, who then ran the Guardian diary, was insisting (mistakenly) that I had worn a moustacheless Manfred Mann beard in my Bolshevik days. The truth (revealed on the right in a 1969 picture) was that I sported sidewhiskers like hairy caterpillars, a style then reasonably common. But not a beard. That came later, and it was a full set on both occasions.

But I digress. I was speaking in the open air on Tuesday night for two reasons. This story from the Liverpool Echo (though it regrettably calls me a ‘Conservative’ and there was no soapbox, just a convenient bench) sets the scene

Also I did not speak continuously for 90 minutes, I am not Fidel Castro, but gave a short harangue and then took many questions from those present. It was a pleasant autumn evening in the fresh air, and I think it was much improved by the fact that the audience were alert and standing up (I work at a standing desk, and think it improves concentration and general health). Interestingly nobody coughed (as they do in multitudes in indoor meetings at this time of year), and the cough-sweets which I had brought with me to offer to offenders remained unused in my pocket.

The meeting was about drugs, and the non-existent war against them. But this was not the problem. The problem was that, to speak on University premises, I would have been obliged to agree to the provisions in these documents

Section 6 in the first of these contains such provisions as : ‘If the event involves an external speaker, then an initial internet search should be conducted to identify whether there are any initial concerns about the speaker….If such concerns are identified then a full risk assessment should take place.’

The excuse or pretext given for this is (of course) the prevention of terrorism, the excuse or pretext for a general assault on English liberty now well under way, and an inadequate and mistaken one in my view , since the longstanding laws against incitement to violence are compatible with free speech and are quite clear as it is) but look at this: ‘If the initial assessment identifies that there may be a possibility of people being drawn into terrorism or of hate speech or serious public disorder or any other factor which causes concern, a panel meeting will be required to discuss the risk assessment.’

This, particularly the wording ‘or any other factor which causes concern’, seems to me (like most such provisions) to have the characteristics of a catch-all which in a slightly different climate (or even this one) could be used to ban a speaker whose views were not approved of for very different reasons.

As for this below (emphases mine) it doesn’t seem to me to be compatible with the concept of free speech at all. :

‘p) The risk assessment will consider measures to reduce any risks associated with the event; this may include requirements such as that: i) admission tickets be issued; ii) there be provision for checking the numbers and/or identity of all those attending the meeting; iii) individuals be named as chairpersons for the meeting or activity; 8 iv) speakers may be asked to provide written undertakings about the conduct of the event and the content of their speech; v) speakers may be asked to provide an outline of their speech for approval prior to the event taking place; vi) a specified number of stewards or porters be available, at the expense of whomsoever the Deputy Vice-Chancellor or his/her appointed officer deems appropriate; vii) the local police be informed of the meeting or activity, and, if appropriate, be invited to attend; viii) any charges levied by the local police be met by the organising body; ix) a written explanation be given concerning the proposed conduct of the meeting or activity; x) particular arrangements be made to comply with fire or other safety arrangements; xi) payment in advance be required to cover hire charges and other reasonable contingencies; xii) full details of the planned movements of speakers (time of arrival and departure, names of those accompanying the speaker) be made available as soon as known and any changes of arrangements be notified promptly.’

Well, I had met similar things once or twice before in dealings with student societies at some London universities, and told the organisers I could not agree to them. I had expected those organisers to respond by suggesting holding the meeting on premises where such rules didn’t apply. But no such luck.

Tom Willett, who had invited me to Liverpool, was made of tougher stuff. He risked his own money by acting as a private individual and hiring a hall which was not on University territory. And that is where the meeting would have happened, except that whoever was supposed to unlock the hall on the evening failed to turn up in time.

Well, Tom is a man of spirit, and this was Liverpool, and it wasn’t actually raining, so the response seemed obvious. I suggested that we went ahead anyway, in the open air. There was a nearby space where it seemed to me we would be disturbing nobody and obstructing nobody, so we just went ahead. And so we did, and pretty successful it was too, good, sharp, robust debate, everyone a bit too cold and uncomfortable to be boring and long-winded, but not so cold and uncomfortable asa to be driven away by cold and misery. I think the whole audience remained to the very end(with perhaps one exception).

And it was also a small declaration, on that windy hilltop, that the spirit of liberty isn’t dead in this country. My thanks to all who came and stayed. It was a privilege to be there.

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22 October 2017 12:19 AM

I am sure that being smacked (very seldom, as it happened) did me some harm, though I am equally sure there are some people who think I should have been smacked more than I was.

But the question is whether banning smacking will do more harm than allowing it. And that is much more complicated. No sane person actively wants to smack a child. But a lot of sane, kind people have sometimes thought it wise to do so.

They have often regretted it afterwards, but more because of the effect it had on them than for the effect it had on the child.

I’m not talking here about the angry and obviously damaging violence you sometimes see in supermarkets, where an exasperated and furious parent, having long ago lost control of a child, lashes out in futile, disorderly rage.

I am certainly not talking about the use of a closed fist.

But children need limits and often crave them. They do not know where or when to stop. They often cannot tell the difference between mild risk and grave danger. They are sometimes very selfish and wilful, and will come to harm if they do not learn to control these things.

And when we ban smacking completely – as Scotland is about to do and as the rest of the country is bound to not long afterwards – we will pay a price for this. We will raise a generation which knows few limits, does not know how to behave and can sometimes only be restrained by the superior force of the State, or by being dosed with powerful and dangerous drugs. In my view, we are already paying that price.

It is part of the colossal battle that has been raging for decades between the family and the State. The State is winning. Parents once had great power. Now they have almost none. Fathers, once kings (or despots) in their own homes, have been declared officially unnecessary.

Stable, lifelong marriage vanishes from among us, scorned by our culture and the law. Step-parents, never quite the same as natural parents however hard they try, are more common than ever.

In such a world, even a well-intentioned light smack is half an inch away from accusations of abuse, the call to Childline, and the official dissolution of the family involved by police and social workers. The ‘rescued’ child is then often plunged into a dismal chaos of neglect in authority-free ‘care’.

These cases aren’t anything like those of Baby Peter or Maria Colwell. But such horror stories have been used to grant greater and greater powers to the authorities to intervene. Most of us think we approve of this change in the balance of forces. But are you sure? Since families stopped disciplining children, the State seems to me to have grown hugely in its willingness to threaten violence.

In the days of smacking, police walked around alone in tunics with no visible weapons. Now they make their rare public appearances in pairs or squads, clad in stab vests, clubs, pepper sprays and handcuffs.

Where parents are weak, all adults are weak. In the schools attended by the poor, and especially by those children who have very little family life and whose fathers are often absent, there is terrible disorder.

This is largely kept secret because nobody knows what to do about it. But it is occasionally revealed.

A little-noticed report earlier this month disclosed the huge level of school exclusions concealed by official figures. Everyone over 50 knows how much less safe and orderly our streets are now than they were.

I think these things are connected. I also think it is impossible, in the country we have become, to make a case for smacking. So I will not try to do so. But I will say there are times when civilisations have to choose between two unwelcome courses.

And we may come, in time, to regret having been quite so smug about how good and kind we thought we were in this era.

A painful reality our cops can't dodge

Police moans about ‘lack of resources’ are at last being laughed at as the selfserving propaganda they are. Good. I have tried to make this point for years, and have,as a result, been dishonestly attacked.

Nobody knows what most of the police now do, since they are largely invisible, and the sight of them last week riding round in dodgems or painting their fingernails, while tens of thousands of crimes are filed and forgotten, just adds to the feeling that we are dealing with a badly run nationalised industry which has forgotten who it serves.

The next time you hear a police spokesdrone claim they haven’t the manpower, show them this chart, which proves that they did a far better job with far fewer numbers (in total and per head) in the past.

As the numbers climbed, the service got worse. And now, the latest estimated population of England and Wales is just under 58.4 million.

Police numbers in March this year were 123,142, plus 9,826 ‘Community Support’ officers and 58,831 white-collar back-up staff.

Time for a go on the dodgems, Sergeant?

Mass murder... what a joke

A disgraceful film was released this week, in which misery, pain, fear and mass murder are milked for feeble giggles.

It is not very good on its own terms, and – like so many modern comedians – uses the f-word repeatedly to jolt the semblance of laughter from its audience, much as you might make a corpse twitch with seeming life by plugging it into the national grid.

The Death Of Stalin makes a farce out of that wholly grim and squalid event. As the monster himself lies dying, a gang of slave-drivers, secret police monsters and gruesome toadies, plus a murderous paedophile, are portrayed as a kind of Carry On farce or a Monty Python sketch. Ha ha.

Well, the only question you need to ask is whether anyone would think the final days of Hitler, the other great European mass-killer, torturer and tyrant, would make a good comedy, with Goebbels, Himmler and the rest of the Nazi elite played for laughs. No, of course not.

But fashionable showbiz persons still can’t grasp that Stalin (Left-wing) was just as evil as Hitler (Right-wing). So they can’t see that either.

Universal Debit

I do not think the Government begin to realise just how bad the new ‘Universal Credit’ benefits system is. Case after case suggests that good, honest people down on their luck are being forced into debt and made to rely on food banks by its cruel delays. ‘Universal Debit’ would be a better name, and if the Tories really don’t want Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street, they should suspend its implementation now.

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10 September 2017 1:43 AM

As we grapple yet again with the problem of our wide-open borders, it is time we realised that there is another reason for this country’s huge migration problem.When I visited the Lincolnshire town of Boston a few years ago, to look at the revolution inflicted on it by mass immigration, I also noted the presence of knots of home-grown British louts and the existence of a smart and costly ‘resource centre’, offering tax-funded advice on how to inject illegal drugs. This plainly had something to do with the problem.At the last count, there were in this country at least 790,000 young people aged between 16 and 24 who were ‘not in education, employment or training’. I suspect that there are plenty more in this miserable category over the age of 24. Bear in mind that all politically important statistics are massaged in some way to conceal the ghastly truth.It is the jobs that such people used to do which are being done by migrants. As the liberal Left ceaselessly and rather stupidly point out, much of what goes on around us, from the NHS to the picking of fruit, the care of the elderly and the running of all those coffee shops, depends on migrant labour. They seem to think this is because the migrants are so nice, as many of them indeed are. BUT migrants don’t work for the NHS or Starbucks out of charity. They do it, perfectly reasonably, for money. Why don’t British people do these jobs? Why do our nurses have to come from Africa? There are three reasons, which no government dares do anything about.The first is the collapse of the old-fashioned family, in which the young learned how to behave. This is worst among the poor. Children who have never known a father’s authority, who arrived at school in nappies, have never shared a meal around a table, can barely read and who speak a sort of mumbled teen patois rather than English, are not going to be any employer’s dream.Forcing them to apply for jobs they don’t really want, from employers who really don’t want them and who would much prefer someone from Portugal or Poland, doesn’t actually solve this. The next is our shameful state school system, whose teachers are often themselves ill-educated. The system strives in vain to teach an academic curriculum to young men and women who really need vocational instruction, because we cannot admit that not all boys and girls need or want the same sort of schools. At the end of this process, the victims are forced into debt to attend university courses far inferior to old-fashioned vocational training. And the third is our welfare system, which responds to failure and misbehaviour by indulging it – a policy which ends by using tax revenues to teach criminals to take illegal drugs ‘safely’, and by handing them substitute drugs, so they can stupefy themselves legally instead. All these subjects lie outside the issues that ambitious career politicians are allowed to address. To do so, you would have to breach the modern taboos of sexism and egalitarianism. And you would have to do something even more heretical – argue that people are responsible for their own actions.Do any of these things and an army of media thought-police will come after you. Always assuming you aren’t forced to stand down as an MP, you will never get anywhere near office or power. We are in the grip of a soft totalitarianism which is no less deadly for being soft. Instead of threatening people with prison for having the wrong opinions, it threatens them with unemployment.If we actually had labour camps and midnight arrests, and state censors sitting in newspaper offices and TV studios, people might notice what was going on. As it is, they just wonder why everything gets worse and worse and nobody does anything about it.

Meet China’s secret weapon – Red Rambo

As we flounder over North Korea (whose leader learned from Iraq that Weapons of Mass Destruction are worth acquiring at any cost), China smiles behind its hand and quietly grows in power.There are many signs of this, but one of the most intriguing is the huge success in China of that country’s first blockbuster rogue hero movie, Wolf Warrior II. Made at great cost to a Hollywood formula, it depicts a Red Chinese Rambo, Leng Feng, played by Jing Wu.He cleverly manages to be both anti-authority at home, and super-patriotic abroad, and has won the warm approval of China’s Communist Party regime. On a revenge mission in Africa, a continent which obsesses the Peking government, he is a noble humanitarian who also defeats an American baddie.The old Soviet Union simply couldn’t manage this sort of propaganda. China, alas, has discovered the secret of how to mix capitalism and modernity with despotism. Some in what is now the free world may be tempted to follow.

Feeble courts are the biggest crime of all

How many times do I need to point out that our prisons are full because our police and courts are too feeble, not because they are too tough?Look at these figures obtained under Freedom of Information rules last week: a burglar who already had 44 convictions for break-ins was not imprisoned. Others left free included a lout who breached an Asbo for the 191st time, a so-called ‘joyrider’ with 26 previous convictions for taking cars, and, of course, a drug abuser with 29 previous convictions.It is very difficult to get such figures out of the criminal justice system. And police absence and uninterest – plus the public despair which discourages the reporting of much crime – means that many thousands of offences are nowadays committed without ever being recorded. A career criminal has probably committed dozens of crimes before the police ever arrest him, several more before he gets anything more than a meaningless caution or an (unpaid) fine, and even more before he gets weedy community service or a suspended sentence that is never activated. It is still much harder to get into prison than to get into university. Prison might scare such people into behaving if it was imposed on a first or second offence. If this happened, many others would be deterred from committing crimes at all.But waiting till someone is a hardened criminal before locking him up is useless against criminal individuals, and deters nobody. Hence the endlessly growing prison population. But the liberal mind is quite closed to the solution. So nothing happens.

******

Look, I like Jacob Rees-Mogg. He generously helped out a few years ago in the battle to save this country from being forced on to Berlin Time. He has cunningly turned the mockery against him to his advantage. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he isn’t photographed soon wearing actual double-breasted pyjamas.But the excitement from both sides over his perfectly normal Christian positions on marriage and abortion is ridiculous. Mr Rees-Mogg certainly believes these things. But he hasn’t the slightest hope of doing anything about either. In our increasingly anti-Christian country, he is just taking on the role filled 150 years ago by the Victorian atheist MP Charles Bradlaugh, a lone parliamentary eccentric. The interesting thing is that Britain has, in so short a time, reached a stage where support for lifelong heterosexual marriage, and an aversion to killing unborn babies, are seen as eccentric, brave or outrageous opinions. Did you notice that happening?

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31 July 2017 5:18 PM

I play a minor but important part in a recent Radio 4 programme about the towering figure of the post-war era, Roy Jenkins. It is most interesting, though not as interesting as it could have been , in my view. I strongly recommend readers to listen to it on the BBC iplayer here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08z93sv . Be quick things mysteriously vanish from this system, often quite quickly, and that it is the devil’s own business to find them again.

Its broadcast last Saturday evening explained to me why I had run into such difficulties with my own BBC Radio 4 programme, to be broadcast at 11.00 a.m. on Friday August 4, about the 50th anniversary of the launch of the ‘legalise dope’ campaign in this country. This took the form of an advertisement in ‘The Times’ signed by a large selection of the supposedly great and allegedly good. A surprising number of them are still alive, and I thought it would be a great programme from the ‘Archive on 4’ slot, almost an hour on Saturday evenings, to which I often listen. Though a few of these notables preferred not to discuss it, there were a lot of good voices, from David Bailey and Tariq Ali to Jonathan Aitken and the amazing Caroline Coon. We even got Jacob Rees-Mogg to talk about the role of his late, revered father, who was Editor of ‘The Times’ at this key moment. There’s some great archive material. And it was easy to punctuate with relevant snippets of the music of the era, which Radio 4 likes quite a bit these days.

When I first suggested it to Radio 4, the idea was flatly rejected, which shocked me a bit since my previous programme, on the supposed ‘Special Relationship’, with the USA had been a modest success, well-reviewed and generally appreciated. So I appealed, and was eventually given the go-ahead. However, it slowly became clear over the following months that we were not heading for the ‘Archive on 4’ slot, but for a much shorter, and (as it turned out) less well-timed position in the schedules. We had to chuck away some lovely stuff, especially Tariq Ali’s reminiscences of that mad era which (perhaps because he is not a drug user) were a lot fuller and clearer than most people’s. But but then you almost always do have to do that.

It now seemed to me that my idea, though separate and barely involving Roy Jenkins, clashed a bit with the Jenkins programme, being broadly about the same era and the same issue. They obviously couldn’t broadcast both in the same slot. I just think mine was the better idea, and had a better reason, if you’re using the word ‘Archive’ in the title - namely the actual (and quite surprising) 50th anniversary of an actual event. Also, it’s my view that the Jenkins programme is pretty much in sympathy with the Great Reformer, which I am not. Richard Weight, its presenter, has not so far as I know carved out a reputation as a stern critic of permissiveness. His closing words seem to me to be those of an admirer ‘The reason so many of our civil rights are today enshrined in law and not merely in custom is due largely to one person, a man who loved life and wanted others to enjoy it too, a man who epitomised Britain’s liberal elite but who took on bigotry and vested interests from whatever quarter’.

That might depend on what you mean by bigotry, by vested interests and indeed what you mean by 'whatever'.

I am included in it as part of a sort of Greek Chorus with Polly Toynbee, in which she warbles that such and such a deed was good, and I then intone that it is bad. Factual ballast is left to John Campbell, author of a superb (because it has a critical edge) biography of Margaret Thatcher and a less good (because it is tinged with sympathy) study of Roy Jenkins.

The Toynbee/Hitchens versicles and responses are presumably there to aid ‘balance’. Though as an idea this scheme runs into problems because on two occasions (homosexual law reform and Race Relations Laws) I sympathised with Jenkins then and sympathise with him now. By contrast, I don’t think Polly could ever find a bad word to say about him. And while it mentions my concerns about some other subjects, my pudding, as it were, has no theme. My critique of jenkins isn't part of the narrative. It is in my 1999 book ‘The Abolition of Britain’. This was a critique of the whole Jenkins revolution from soup to nuts, and very much based upon Jenkins’s 1959 book ‘The Labour case’, and especially the chapter in it ‘Is Britain Civilised?’ whose title I deliberately used for my own chapter on Jenkins. The book and the chapter are also specifically referenced in the programme.

Jenkins’s scorn for the alcohol licensing laws looks pretty foolish now that he has comprehensively got his way. His objections to the ‘censorship’ which prevented the widespread and open publication of pornography also seem to me to have been a very grave mistake indeed. As it happens, Jenkins’s Race Relations laws did, in effect, license censorship of certain revolting epithets, and for a good reason. I tend to think that a Britain in which both pornography and racial bigotry were restrained in law would be better than one where only one of them is. The worst mistakes of the era, the strangling of independent juries, the evisceration of marriage, the similar gutting of criminal justice and the unending failed experiment in replacing effective preventive policing with useless reactive policing, were barely discussed in the Saturday programme. There was an interesting admission that Jenkins had toyed with legalisation of marijuana and a glimmer, though not much more, of understanding of the subtle purpose of the Wootton Committee (whose revolutionary chairman was cunningly selected by Jenkins) and the Misuse of Drugs Bill which resulted from it.

There was also a curious point where it was recorded as a sort of triumph that Richard Crosssman had been persuaded to give his backing to the 1967 Abortion Act, so allowing this supposedly private Bill to become law. Why is this a surprise? Crossman was a sexual revolutionary before his time, who as a 1930s Oxford Don had a notorious affair with a married woman, who went on to abort what was almost certainly a baby fathered by the future Cabinet Minister. No doubt Crossman was sympathetic to this cause. Why should he not have been? Like many apparently staid Labour figures of the period, he was a 1960s man long before the 1960s came to pass.

I would also like to know more about exactly what Jenkins (whose children went to fee-charging schools, I think) felt about the comprehensive school revolution pursued by his old friend and ally, Anthony Crosland. Without this enormous change in the national mind, it is possible Jenkins's reforms would not have gone as far as they did, and even that some of them might have been reversed.

Annoyingly for me, I was allowed to point out the weird facts about the Chatterley trial (no prosecution witnesses, thousands of copies printed in anticipation of an acquittal). But I had no chance to pursue the things that follow from this, that is, my belief that the Chatterley Trial, in public imagination, drama and every other way, is totally, misunderstood in our culture. All everyone knows about the actual process is that one silly quote about whether the jury would ‘let their wives and servants read it’. This is as it happens completely unrepresentative of the event as a whole. I really would like to let rip on this one day, in a liberal forum, but, like so many of my interests, I am so out of step with conventional wisdom that I doubt I ever shall.

If you read C.H. Rolph’s great account of the whole thing, it seems clear to me that the Chatterley trial (involving a pretty poor book by a major author) could never have resulted in a conviction. It was a test more or less bound to show that the ‘artistic merit’ defence was pretty much impossible to overcome. There would always be someone prepared to testify that such and such a work had ‘artistic merit’, however rubbishy it was. Academics willing to tell the truth, that it was an undistinguished, sometimes ridiculous book unimproved by a smattering of rude words, were by then in short supply. Lawrence, at the time, still had a far greater reputation than he does now, and who would risk attacking him? And so it proved.

This defence had been devised in Jenkins’s original foray into cross-party lawmaking, the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. In alliance with liberal Tories such as Norman St John Stevas, Jenkins was able to get this revolutionary law on to the statute book. It was his first significant use of the ‘Private Members’ Bill’ tactic, and of the cross-party alliance tactic, with which he would achieve so many of his aims, from cultural revolution to membership of the Common Market, in the years to come. They were all based on the clever principle that major changes could be made without them ever needing to be put in party manifestoes at general elections. How can the public punish political parties at elections, for actions they have not taken and for which they have never assumed responsibility? How indeed? The parties will always ally against the people, when the desires of the elite are at stake.

28 May 2017 1:02 AM

Theresa May should get herself a stick-on pencil moustache, some very dark glasses and a white military uniform with lots of medals and a set of fancy epaulettes. If she’s going to behave like a Third World leader, she ought to look like one.Troops on the streets, indeed. What a futile non-answer to the problem of terrorist murder this is, and what a complete departure from centuries of British liberty.In all my travels, often to less fortunate parts of the world, troops posted on the streets have been an invariable sign of a society on the skids, and a government that prefers force to thought.How humiliating and embarrassing that such scenes should come to our great free capital.Actually, I suspect it’s something our dim state machine has wanted to do for ages, and now thinks it has the excuse for. Mrs May’s Cabinet, ignorant and lacking the robust old British loathing of such things, gave in and let it happen.What is far worse is that the idea was not then mocked and jeered off the stage by the rest of us, as the ridiculous Blair creature’s futile dispatch of tanks and troops to Heathrow was back in 2003.Year by year our hopeless egalitarian schools and our joke universities turn out more and more citizens who don’t know that you have to defend liberty all the time if you want to keep it.Can anyone explain to me how militarising the country and dotting it with armed men in camouflage battle dress (designed to help them hide in forests) is a rational response to the atrocity in Manchester? Of course not. The two have no connection.On the contrary, the sight of a once-great country over-reacting in this pointless way must cause our enemies to snigger in their bushy Islamic beards.‘Look at the infidels scurrying about at our bidding,’ they must think. Why give them this satisfaction? It seems to me, as it has for some time, that old-fashioned beat coppers with a close, intimate knowledge of the areas they patrol would be much more likely to see these atrocities coming than clanking robocops, soldiers or our vaunted and hyped ‘security’ services, who are always claiming to protect us but have failed so completely in this and several other cases. Such killers almost invariably come from among the swirling underworld of drug-taking petty criminals.The Manchester murderer, Salman Abedi, was, unsurprisingly, a cannabis abuser. His recent behaviour – yelling prayers in the street – had been strange.Ought not someone in authority to have noticed when a bearded young religious fanatic with a drug habit started buying large quantities of hair bleach? He plainly wasn’t planning to become a blond. But who was there to listen to such fears? A police car driving by at 30mph? A phone number that nobody answers? A police station that’s shut? I HAVE noticed that any dissent from the standard view of these events is met, on social media and elsewhere, with attempts to claim that my views show some sort of disrespect to the victims and their grieving families.I will not give in to this nasty dictatorship of grief.I am just as distressed by the horrors of Manchester as anyone else. I refuse to be told I’m not sad enough, because I don’t conform to the Government’s thought-free response to it, which has now been failing for many years. Nor should you be.Get the soldiers back into their barracks, and bring back proper police foot patrols.

Finally, a great film (if only you can find it)

What a joy to see an intelligent film, slick, clever, surprising fast-moving, glamorous and thoughtful. Yet I had to seek it out at a late-night showing at the back of a multiplex, where the big screens were reserved for weary sequels of sequels.If you can find Miss Sloane, starring Jessica Chastain, please see it. But how can good movies succeed if they are hidden from us?

The BBC’s finest...peddling deadly cocaine

I was banned from the BBC’s supposedly wonderful Today programme several years ago, after I gave a live on-air pasting to the pro-drug Professor David Nutt. Before that I used to get on quite a lot, but since then, nothing.I have often wondered since if the programme had a deep-seated bias against our drug laws. It always seemed to give prominent coverage to any call to soften those laws.Well, on Thursday morning, I think we got proof.Today once essential, has in recent years become so dull and complacent that I often doze off while listening.It is claimed that its audience has gone up. If so it must be composed of supermarket check-out robots, whose idea of excitement is to shout ‘Unexpected item in bagging area!’ Nobody else could actively want to listen to its lifeless daily rehearsals of Leftish conventional wisdom.But on Thursday there was an unexpected item in the drugging area. I suddenly realised I was listening to a man giving out the current prices for various kinds of cocaine.Hang on, I thought, as I shook myself into full wakefulness. The programme normally gives out exchange rates for the US dollar, and the stock market index. But the price of cocaine? This was new. Cocaine is a Class A drug under the Misuse Of Drugs Act 1971. This means you can get life imprisonment for selling it, and seven years in jail for buying it. To want to know the price, or to give it out, surely condones a serious crime.And the BBC has a vested interest in being in favour of law enforcement. Its licence fee is collected under the threat of fines and imprisonment.If the BBC wants that law enforced, it must surely support all law enforcement. I can’t see it being pleased if other media gave soft, wet interviews to advocates of licence-fee evasion.Yet here was some bloke merrily discoursing on what cocaine costs, which is surely of no interest to any law-abiding person. Then, wholly unchallenged by an utterly soppy presenter, this character claimed it was ‘difficult to have honest conversations saying you can use lots of drugs with relatively low risks, for most people, if you follow some simple strategies’.Difficult? Where is it difficult? What’s difficult is to call for the law to be enforced.Who now denies that cocaine is in common, unchecked use among students, bankers, politicians and, perhaps above all, media and broadcasting types? The guest added (still uninterrupted): ‘Instead of simply saying to people, “Don’t use drugs, they’re dangerous”, that’s not a useful dialogue for people who are making informed decisions to use drugs as a wider lifestyle.‘That person might also go to yoga and be a vegetarian. You know it’s about a lifestyle choice and we need to help people stay safe with the choices they make.’I asked the BBC for a response. Not merely was that response useless in the extreme, and nothing to do with the questions I had asked, they actually asked me to use it in full.Well, I haven’t room to do that, but I will post it on my blog so that you can laugh at it.

*The BBC's reply is now posted on the blog, in the posting immediately after (and so above) this one. Or click on this link

Why this is a mad country: Applicants for jobs in nursing are being turned away because they cannot speak good enough English. The response of the authorities is to consider lowering the standards nurses are required to meet. We can all see what is wrong with this, but it will almost certainly happen.

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